Restraint Systems in Tactical Vehicles: Uncertainty Study Involving Airbags, Seatbelts, and Military Gear

Adding advanced safety features (e.g., airbags) to restraint systems in tactical vehicles could decrease the injury risk of their occupants. The impact of frontal crashes on the occupants has been assessed recently through experimental data and finite element (FE) models. However, the number of such experiments is relatively small due to high cost. In this paper, we conduct an uncertainty study to infer the advantage of including advanced safety features, if a larger number of experiments were possible. We introduce the concept of group injury risk distribution that allows us to quantify under uncertainty the injury risk associated with advanced safety features, while averaging out the effect of uncontrollable factors such as body size. Statistically, the group injury risk distribution is a mixture of individual injury risk distributions of design conditions in the group. We infer that advanced safety features have the potential to reduce substantially injury risk in frontal crashes.